


Bellatrix

by Starchart



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Crack Relationships, Crack Treated Seriously, Duelling, F/M, Healthy Relationships, Hogwarts, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, One Shot, Retrospective, Tragedy, Why Did I Write This?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 17:38:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16163681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starchart/pseuds/Starchart
Summary: I wanted to read a fanfic where Mad Eye Moody and Bellatrix Lestrange had a healthy, nondestructive relationship where neither changed much from their cannon personalities, because it was my belief that if that existed, anything existed on the internet. I didn't really find one. This is my response. Apparently, if things don't exist on the internet that I choosespecificallyfor being improbable to find, I create them.Bellatrix Black and Alastor Moody meet at Hogwarts.This tells the story of their lives until the end of the first Wizarding War.Not too much violence, nor really much romance. (Less explicit than the books.) It's mostly a character study, narrated by Moody.





	Bellatrix

She was a star.

We met in school, and it was, well, it was simply magical.

It was during first year. Hufflepuff and Slytherin's first defense lesson. After half the year of managing the snide comments the Ravenclaws directed towards my house, and the truly impressive injuries the Slytherins and Gryffindors inflicted upon each other, our professor had flatly refused to continue teaching unless the schedule had been rearranged. I didn't blame him.

She and I were the best students in the new class. We found that out by accident the first day, on account of her, at the time, poor aim. The class had been broken up into pairs to practice some sort of boring jinx, I can't remember what. She and I weren't partnered, in fact, we were on opposite sides of the room, but this didn't stop her from accidentally hitting my partner with a jinx that I'm pretty sure wasn't on the curriculum.

I, of course, being the law-conscious, if not quite yet law-abiding, citizen that my parents had taught me to be, immediately took offense. My return jinx (milder than hers) caught her squarely on the back.

"Oy, Black, watch where you're pointing you're wand."

She slowly turned, eyes glinting, a half smile forming on her partially open lips. She raised her wand and before I knew it, we were dueling. It was . . . it was like nothing I had ever expected.

 _Here_ was someone I could match. Her movements had a strange sort of grace, like she didn't even think about what she was doing. Her eyes never left mine as she cast spell after spell. She was like no one I had ever met before.

The Ravenclaws that I had tried dueling with had a very perfunctory approach to spells, delighting in getting them to work, in understanding their theory, but not caring about that extra practice to make them natural. Our house, Hufflepuff took an understandable, staid approach to defense. Get in a group and shoot blasters until the threat was gone. Practical and effective, but it wasn't quite _dueling_. This was.

The fight lasted about thirty seconds. I lost, but I didn't care. Her freezing the floor then melting it slightly to make it slippery, then hitting me with a body bind before I was able to get up was genius. It had been a beautiful challenge.

We both got detention. But even as my friends helped me up and I watched her cast the counter charms for the few spells of mine that had managed to hit her, her eyes never left my face. It still had the serene half smile of excitement at life that always defined her, always would. Some later said that she was mad, but once upon a time the smile wasn't quite madness.

Our teacher began to pontificate about the terrible display we had put on, waving his hands and getting very excited. I will accept that having me and Black in the same class was probably the reason for his retirement at the end of the year.

But in the moment, she was still watching me, calm and collected, eyes never leaving my face, still smiling that strange half smile. Our teacher turned his back to me, to more effectively berate her.

What I did next would define my life. It was simple really. I mouthed one single word.

"Rematch."

Her half smile abruptly morphed into a fierce grin, and fire lit in her eyes. The fire warmed me then. It was a small thing, cheery. It wouldn't always be that way, but it was for a while longer.

That year, we met in deserted classrooms, outside by the lake, in the dungeons. It wasn't meant to be more than a few times, but, always, the loser of our duels would challenge the other to a rematch, and the other would always accept. It soon became clear that we were both practicing outside of our dueling sessions. We were frighteningly evenly matched, and even my training long hours into the night couldn't let me surpass her, at least not for more than a week or so.

I spent the entire summer after first year training as well as I could. My parents, both Aurors, did not quite realize the depth of my obsession, I think, for they were pleasantly, if vaguely, supportive at the times when they were home, not alarmed. Or perhaps they simply did not know what children were like very well. 

However, I have to allow that I was behaving perfectly in character, so perhaps they knew everything after all. 

While I might not be able to do magic, I spent my time learning the incantations new spells, practicing how to cast sequences of them with a quill or short stick substituting for a wand, and learning how to dodge. When school returned, I would be ready.

However, of course, so was she. Our correspondence was light that summer, having exchanged little but spell fire the last six months of school. We did write to coordinate when we would be able to meet for our first fight that neither of us could imagine missing, but that was it. When I returned, I was met with the disappointing realization that the Blacks took a bit of a more _flexible_ view of underage magic restrictions, so for the first few weeks, until I remembered the feeling of spells, I was out of my depth in our fights.

We continued, learning, out of necessity, how to hide from the teachers as we fought. But even this combined effort didn't fully lead us to friendship. The truce had to happen first.

She was the one to venture it, sardonically, saying that we might, in the interests of sanity, join forces train with each other rather than always trying to do as much damage to each other as possible. It was four months into our second year, two weeks before the Hogwarts express was due to leave for the holiday break. By that time, we were regularly putting each other in the hospital wing, often both at once. In fact, she said it while we were both groaning and looking up at the ceilings, having learned from painful experience that we needed stronger shields if we both accidentally cast an exploding hex at the same time. While Madame Pomphery could usually fix bones in an instant, since this was the third time this week we had both ended up in the hospital wing with similar injuries, she was wisely letting us have time to consider our decisions. 

After spending some moments getting over my surprise, I agreed. Madame Pomphery must have been listening, for she took my words as her cue to begin to administer medical assistance.

Black was watching me, I realized, throughout her treatment. It was rather disturbing to watch someone not react at all as their arm was set or their ribs popped back into place. She had that same half-smile that she always did, and was staring at me as though nothing else mattered at the moment.

We left the hospital wing together, walking, without conscious thought, towards the library together.

From that day, we began to study together. It was strange to discover that this girl who I had been cursing for the past year had a personality and a vocabulary beyond hexes and jinxes and curses. I found in quick order that she could be wickedly funny, though usually at someone else's expense. She didn't care much for consequences of whatever she wanted to do, though neither did I at that point.

About a month after we returned from classes, we became comfortable enough that we were each able to begin spending time with the other's group of friends. Our dueling was legendary enough among the Slytherins that none of them objected to Black sitting with me and my Hufflepuff friends, and I was welcome, albeit slightly grudgingly, among Bellatrix's Slytherin acquaintances. On the side of the Hufflepuffs, they all knew about the crazy girl that I had been hexing for over a year now. I suppose I was considered a decent enough fellow to be allowed some eccentricities, and they were willing to accept her for my sake. 

I admit that my being a pureblood probably helped the Slytherins accept me, though that never directly came up in conversation. The fact that I had started hexing Black over something she did to a 'Puff in that first defense class helped my house similarly, thought they were also too tactful to mention it.

After that, the years past. In our third year, we exchanged Christmas presents. I still have the flask she gave me. It was charmed against poisons as a kind of peace agreement, for we had, by mutual agreement, expanded our war into both subtle potions and runic wards. We were both vying for top in that class, though I think if Professor Babbling had ever found out what we intended to _do_ with her class, she might have had a heart attack. I think Black appreciated my gift of night vision goggles for our now common excursions into the Forbidden forrest.

I learned in these years I spent with her that above all she was loyal. I often wondered if she went into Slytherin by mere force of will powered by loyalty to her family, for truly, loyalty was her dominant guide. She was headstrong, but she didn't forget her friends, or her family. Her family most of all. Those friends were few and far between, and she could often be cruel to those she didn't care for, but she was willing to be kind for my sake. And my friendship with her was by far the most important relationship in my life, so I didn't care.

Our summers were no longer spent alone. We visited each other often, though rarely at her house, and wrote even more frequently.

In our fourth year, I asked her if we might go by a first name basis. She responded by looking at me curiously for a long moment, then agreeing.

And from that moment on, we were Alastor and Bellatrix, not Moody and Black. I liked that better, for all I would later realize it was deceiving.

We kissed for the first time on the Hogwarts Express in our fifth year, in a compartment warded so heavily that years later, no one else has yet found it, or even recognized that it is missing. My star, my beautiful star, I called her.

The next two years were heaven. I won't bother to describe them here.

And then we left school, and the world that we had constructed fell away. She loved me. I loved her. She knew that. I knew that. She was loyal to me, in her own way. But it wasn't enough. It was nothing compared to her loyalty to her family. The Blacks came first, they always had. So when the terms of the marriage contract came, she kissed me and sweetly told me that she had to go. And I let her. I couldn't argue with her. If I could have changed her mind, she wouldn't have been my Bella, and I wouldn't have changed her for the world.

My heart would beat for no one but her, and I knew the same was almost true of her heart, but it wasn't quite true. And so I watched as she walked down the isle, becoming Bellatrix Lestrange. I don't think she loved him, but it wouldn't occur to her that that could have mattered and she wouldn't have understood if I had asked. She was loyal to her family, and that was enough for anything.

And so I turned my back on things that couldn't possibly come to fruit and continued our friendship. We wrote letters. The Acadamy is supposed to be rigorous, but it couldn't quite compare to my duels with Bellatrix. I became a legend there, on that account. I was satisfied and perhaps dismissive of the other recruits in my class, but never overly proud, for I always conscious that there was someone my equal or better than I.

I wrote to her once, suggesting that she come, become an Auror, and then we could be unstoppable together. She wrote back and said, perhaps with a touch of sadness I had never seen in her before or after, that that path wasn't for her.

And then the war came.

And, on my first response to a Death Eater raid, I watched with horror as she threw the killing curse. She was wearing a mask, and no one else identified her, but after nearly seven years of careful study of her fighting style, of listening to her voice, there was no way I could mistake her. Not even under those circumstances.

She apparated away quickly after that, and no one was captured. My freezing was written off to a normal response to seeing someone cast the killing curse for the first time. I didn't argue for the moment.

I sat alone for hours after that, trying to reconcile my world. She was loyal to her family, fanatically so. And the Blacks, the Lestranges, had sided with the Dark. And so she would be loyal to that as well. Loyalty to her family was ingrained within her very soul. She had loved her sister Andromeda dearly once, but I had to physically restrain her from attacking Andromeda after she eloped. Betrayal of family was to her the worst thing in her world.

That night, I realized quite clearly that I would never be able to hold Bellatrix in my arms again. I had to destroy her. I had to destroy her before she could destroy the world.

That night was when Alistor Moody, skilled Auror trainee, died. That was when Mad Eye Moody first stepped into the world. It would be years before I lost my eye, but even before then Lestrange would find out that I, too, could be fanatical.

My fights with Bellatrix Lestrange nee Black following that night were intense, like our first, but so much more deadly now, with no Madame Pomphery to make us see reason. Whenever her mask was blown off, she was still smiling that half smile with the open mouth and the wide eyes, even as she cast the most deadly curses known to Wizarding kind.

Was she mad even then, when we first met as children? Is she mad now? I do not know how to answer. She is Bellatrix. A will of her own. Inscrutable.

In the war, we saw each other often, always at the ends of the wands, far more often than we saw each other in the years directly following her marriage. Others fell around us, but we were always, have always been, rather evenly matched. I fought with desperation, knowing that all is be lost if I cannot defeat her, or at least hold her off. She fought with the same easy, fluid calm that she always fought with, as if it was all a game, nothing real. But it is clear that she enjoys our confrontations deeply. Others remark how she becomes more happy, though they say insane, when I arrive.

I sometimes wonder if anything could have been done to change our fates. But no, they were set in stone. Our fates could not be altered without changing the things that make us who we are.

In the ranks of the Aurors, there are few people more hated than Bellatrix Lestrange. I cannot stand any of her actions, and I have spent the entire war fighting with all of my being against what she stands for. I have lost friends, watched children die, and seen families torn apart, all because of her. She brings sorrow wherever she goes.

It is only now as I sit in the stands of the Wizengamot, the weight of the Longbottom's torture on my shoulders, the mourning of Barty Crouch's mother in my ears, that I can truly ask myself the question that I have avoided these long years during the war: Do I still love her?

In the trial, she doesn't spare a glance for me. I am not who she has come to speak to. Just as she was as a child, she never spares any thought for anything outside of her main purpose. It is Voldemort, now, not our friendship, but it is the same principle. She is happy, I can tell. She is finally proving her loyalty to the cause that her family chose for her in the most final way possible.

It is not until I reach my home, having watched the dementors lead her away to Azkaban, wondering if I should have wanted her death, that I answer my question.

Do I love her? 

Always. 

Even if she should have been a Hufflepuff, I _am_ one. And Hufflepuff means loyalty. It means never giving up, not just on problems, but on people. It means quiet resolve in times when no one will ever know, simply because it is the right thing to do. It means mourning someone evil simply because they were once a friend, while mourning all of the loss they have caused. It is hard, thankless, possibly quixotic work, but I am Hufflepuff.

As she was being led away, she smiled at me, the same way she used to as children to when she had a wonderful secret, and I realize for her nothing has changed between us.

In a way, it hasn't, even for me. I will always love Bellatrix.

When I swore I would destroy her all those years ago, I did it for her, for her honor, for our love, for the small glimmer of good that I could still see in her. No courtly knight on horseback ever had a more important duty to perform for his lady. For if there is one thing I will never forgive myself for, it is letting her hurt herself this badly.


End file.
